Last year I played a Scrabble match against the Scrabble World Champion. Brett Smitheram is from Camborne and until last month when he lost his crown, he was the greatest Scrabble player in the world. I had a bit of help. I played it on Facebook Live, gave our audience a view of my tiles and invited them to help me make each move. I still lost. He was better than me – or even better than all of us. But I gave him a short-lived run for his money.

This week, another academic study has asserted that men are better than women at something – and this time it’s Scrabble. After all, the Scrabble World Championships have yet again been won by a man, for the 10 year in a row, so they must be better. But the interesting thing about this study is the reasoning that it gives for men’s superiority in the field. It’s not that they have a better capacity for gaining the skills required to be good at Scrabble – just that they have a preference for engaging in Scrabble-like activities.

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A recent BBC programme No More Boys and Girls: Can Our Kids Go Gender Free? explored just how much gender stereotypes affect what and how our children learn and how that shapes their future. Professor Gina Rippon, leading expert in cognitive neuroimaging, told the programme: “Structurally there appear to be very, very few differences between a girl’s brain and a boy’s brain. The differences we’re seeing are not because they were determined at the moment of conception but because this very hungry brain arrives in the world and the world is instantly plunging it into a sea of pink and blue.”

My daughter wants to be a fairy when she grows up. I’ve tried to convince her that maybe she should look into making robots or being an astronaut or flying a plane but she’s four and she’s adamant that she wants to be pretty and wear pink and the fairy role is perfect for her. It’s clear that I must have already instilled some kind of gender stereotype into her before she even reaches primary school. But if I’d brought her up in a more gender neutral way, would that have made a difference?

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More and more schools are introducing gender neutral school uniforms. John Lewis have put themselves on the frontline of gender politics by announcing they’ve removed their boys and girls labels from clothes. They faced a huge public backlash in the process, with people even suggesting they should be renamed Joan Lewis. Clarks insisted they also have a ‘gender neutral ethos’ after being shamed for selling flimsy shoes for girls.

The new gender neutral clothing at John Lewis

But hiding or ignoring gender differences is not the answer. If a family wants to eschew pronouns and bring up their child in a non-binary way, that’s up to them. But it has to go much deeper than that.

Stronger female characters in children’s books would help. A recent survey found 25% of 5,000 books studied had no female characters; across children’s media, less than 20% showed women with a job, compared to more than 80% of male characters.

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Celebrating better female role models in the media who haven’t based their careers on how they look or how skinny they are or what they’re wearing is key too - making sure girls can look up to strong, powerful, influential activists and advocates and not just size 6 clothes horses.

And developing children’s passions, building up their self-esteem around the things they do well and affirming positive values that aren’t about appearance and are about their traits and strengths and skills. It’s too early for me to know whether my daughter will be brilliant at science or writing – or both or neither – but she loves running and she’s fast, for a four-year-old. I need to reinforce that and keep her interested in sport and make it clear that princesses can run too.

The idea of pink for girls and blue for boys is relatively new – it was only in the post-war baby boom that retailers assigned those colours to boys and girls. It’s probably my fault that my daughter loves pink and sparkly things and playing with cuddly toys and wearing dresses. But that in no way reflects my desire to reinforce conservative values or social norms.

I’d like to think my daughter can dress in a sparkly tutu and play with Peppa Pig and still believe she can be a rocket scientist, a runner or even a World Scrabble Champion. Dressing said child in a gender neutral way and encouraging it to play with Thomas The Tank Engine will not make it better at Scrabble.